Developing a Strategic Quality Plan

Strategic planning today is a requirement just to survive. Leaders must be looking ahead,
anticipating change, and developing strategies to proactively and successfully navigate through the
turbulence created by constant change.

Strategic planning provides an organization with a clear purpose and direction. Everyone in an
organization needs to know what you produce, create, sell, service or do, who your target
customers are, and how you compete. A good strategy will balance revenue and productivity
initiatives. Without strategic planning, businesses simply drift, and are always reacting to the
pressure of the day. Organizations that don't plan have exponentially higher rates of failure than
those that plan and implement well.

Organizations, regardless of whether they are private, public or not-for-profit, face a continuous
barrage of requests to improve quality. Every quality management initiative can, and must be tied
to key business process performance indicators in order to have any real impact on productivity
and the bottom-line. However, strategic plans are rarely translated into the quality strategies
needed to ensure overall performance improvement gains.

Management may attend public quality sessions to get acquainted with the latest strategy and then
come back into your organization prepared to introduce initiatives such as Six Sigma, Lean
Manufacturing, Process Management, Quality Awards and so on. But the complaints about quality
continue in the organization until someone finally asks the questions:

Are these the right strategies?
Do we even know what the problem is that we're trying to fix?
Business Improvement Architects Strategic Quality Planning Process will move your organization
and/or a department's quality management team beyond the notion of quick fixes and into the
realm of solutions. It leads to the development of Quality Management Strategies.

This process starts with defining what "quality" may mean to your organization/department and
continues with a process for developing quality standards, creating a vision for quality and
translating the vision into a series of quality strategies. We will take your quality team through a
process to:

Review your organizations and/or departments strategic plan or imperatives

Identify what quality initiatives or strategies have been used in the past

Understand the voice of customer

Engage employees and gain their feedback to ensure their continued commitment to quality

Create the quality vision

Develop a statement of quality and standards

Identify the quality strategies

Develop the strategic implementation plan